RUPEETHON 5 IS GO!

As we hinted on Monday, today is an important one here at Rupeethon HQ as we unveil our upcoming plans. Get ready to mark your calenders!

Rupeethon 5 will be held Sept. 12- Sept. 14. Boom, out of the gate swinging! Stay tuned these coming weeks as we reveal more about prizes, game lineup and start times.

Also, we are pleased to introduce 'Rupeethon Hot Summer Saturdays'. We plan to stream some of our practice runs, our general setup and maybe some surprise titles just for the fun of it. Maybe we'll finally let Conor stream Okami. These will most likely take place on random Saturdays leading up to Rupeethon 5, so keep yourselves in the know by following us here and on twitter for announcements on when these will take place.

Wait, there's more! How could there still be more!?!? Join us for our first mini-marathon! 'Rupeethon Presents: Hyrule Warriors' will be held on Sept 27th. Watch us as we 'knockout' hordes and hordes of moblins for the first time!

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08.12.13 - 02:00 pm EDT

Last year, Rupeethon 3 broke our record by announcing its start date a mere month in advance. This year, the Rupeethon crew is proud to announce Rupeethon 4: Electric Dodongaloo just two under two weeks of its start date! That’s right folks, we’re back to play some video games and chat about everything under the sun once more. All your favorite things are coming back. Twitter raffles. Dramatic readings. Strange viewer requests. Stilted dancing.

Set your calendars for Thursday, August 22nd. It’s going to be grand.

Help make Rupeethon 4 a success by dropping by and saying hey. Donations and some word of mouth would be gravy too. And on our end, we promise to continue innovating the art of video game marathons. Maybe next year, we’ll be able to announce Rupeethon 5 the day before. Year 6 could have no warning at all! Perhaps we may come to learn that Rupeethon 10 was held years ago!

I KNEW IT!

- Scott

Rupeethon 3 Reflection

08.22.12 - 02:00 pm EDT

$10,051.47. If you had told me on that cold December 2009 evening when Scott first suggested we run a gaming marathon for Child's Play that after 3 years we would have raised $10,051.47, I would have said you were full of shit. This whole Rupeethon quest has so wildly exceeded my expectations, it frankly makes me a little bit dizzy. And yet, there is that total. 423 hours of gaming and streaming has netted a five-figure total for an exceptionally worthy charity.

Hospitals are terrifying places, even for adults. Earlier this summer, when I went to the ER with a broken wrist, I found myself constantly figeting with my phone, playing solitaire, texting everyone in my contact list, anything to distract me from the pain and from my surroundings. In those two short hours, I witnessed a belligerant drunk forcibly restrained by two armed officers, a girl coughing blood into a TB mask from a severe lung infection and two victims of a car crash brought in on strechers. Three months later and the discomfort of that night still sits in my chest. I can only imagine how unbelievably terrifying an extended ICU stay must be for a child.

That is why Child's Play has become so important to me. Why every August I dedicate over a hundred hours of my time, often at the temporary expense of my physical well being, to raise money. Without games and toys to distract them, children stuck with life-threatening, if not terminal, illnesses are in a living hell. What's worse, they're being robbed of a childhood. Some of my fondest memories from elementary school are of spending weekends with a friend playing through Ocarina of Time. If a Wii, GameCube controller and a copy of the LoZ Collector's Edition costs $200, then I have been a part of an effort to share that childhood experience with 50 seriously ill children. 100 if they beat the game paired with a friend like I did.

Since the end of Rupeethon 2, I have graduated college, traveled throughout Europe and across the United States. I held my first "adult" job and attained conversational competence in a foreign language. And yet none of these accomplishments have filled me with the same level of satisfaction and excitement as that moment when the Rupeethon franchise donations total exceeded $10,000. 4:01pm Tuesday August 21, 2012. That is the exact moment I could begin to tell people that I helped raise over $10,000 for charity. And that's the coolest freaking thing I've done in my life.

I do not know what adventures the next year has in store for me. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure Rupeethon 4 happens, whether or not I can be in the gaming chair, or manning chat. So I'll be seeing all you folks next August, whether I'm signing on from Long Island, Norway, China or Antarctica. Until then, may your L-Targets always lock on to the fucking tongue.

KCaCtR: ~Jon (jdmsl or rupeethon-1 in chat)

Clouds Gather on the Horizon...

07.09.12 06:00 pm

Last August, the worst hurricane to hit New England in 21 years arrived nary 2 days after the conclusion of Rupeethon 2. This historic storm succeeded a series of other disasters including the U.S.'s worst Earthqake of 2011, record breaking flooding and a housefire...IN A FIREFIGHTER'S HOUSE. Some archaeologists pointed to ancient Mayan stone carvings of a young boy in Elfen garb weilding a sword and frantically began revising predictions to say that the Mayans were off by a year.

But as the winds calmed and final donation totals were tallied, the elements again fell dormant. That is, until last month.

It was a scorching summer day. The temperature climbed and climbed past the hundred degree mark (or forty degree mark for those Celciusly inclined). Satan himself rose from Hell only to proclaim that Earth was too hot for his liking and returning home. Storm after storm ravaged the country, desperately seeking to search and destroy 7 intrepid nerds in their quest to raise money for the Chirrens.

Yes folks, it's happening. Dust off your fallout shelters and begin stockpiling beans because Rupeethon is back in all its apocalyptic glory!! Start the rapture in style with Scott, Jon, Rich, Conor, Dough, Jake, Money and all the rest.

Wow!

08.24.2011 04:oo pm

That is really the best way we can describe our feelings toward the success of Rupeethon II. $4,111.14 is a big number and truth be told more than we had ever imagined recieving. Besides having a great opportunity to help better the lives of needy children, We honestly feel like the greatest thing to have come out of this crazy, little experiment of ours has been getting to meet, interact and share it with some truly amazing and kind individuals. You helped make this experience truly remarkable for us here at Rupeethon HQ. You continue to inspire us and we deeply appreciate all of your support these last two years. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

We have also found a winner for the Ocarina prize and are awaiting confirmation, so please check your emails! We have also determined our top donator and will be sending them the superb trophy as a gesture of our thanks.

As for the possibility of Rupeethon 3, we are not ready at this moment to give a definate answer whether or not it will occur. Although we would love to bring you another installment, the demands of the real world are bearing down on us. We are however open to discussions about it and are currently taking suggestions for names over in the forum (so the chances can't be too bad if we're doing that, right?). We will let you know here as well as on Facebook as soon as we have a definitive answer to give. In the meantime, thank you once again for your support

see you, space cowboy

What three-thousand?!??!!

08.21.2011
12:56 am

Over 80 hours into Rupeethon we have hit an amazing $3000 dollars! And have embarked on a quest to hit 3000 seconds of Nyan!
We are still going strong, and working our way through Minish Cap.

Rupeethon is still going strong!

08.19.2011
3:43 am

We're over 40 hours strong and have raised nearly $1,200 for Child's Play Charity!
The marathon is going strong and if you haven't had a chance to donate or spread the word then please do.

Ocarina of time is slowly wrapping up. We're currently on the Water Temple and hope to start Majora's Mask sometime today. With Majora's Mask on the horizon
we've started our 30/30 challenge. If 30 donors donate $30 each we will do the Kafei-Anju sidequest. If you remember the epic fail we had with the quest last year
and want to see it repeated then now's the time to donate! Once we beat Majora's Mask it will be too late.

Oh God.

08.17.2011
12:48 am

We tried to contain it. We really did. But Murphy's Law is irresistable. It cannot be stopped.

The Rupeethon Team has been dilligently hammering out the last few kinks with our new video capture card (it's broken), the website (I have an hour left on my Dreamweaver trial and the website is half done), the new donation widget (haven't even started yet), the video editing software (hates Windows 7), the Rupeethon Dungeon decorations (it's going to look awesome once I finish it), and cooling issues (it was like 80o down there last year). But a train that derails 100 yards before the station and pulls up to the platform as a twisted flaming mass of steel and death is still on time, right? We have two weeks to get this all done, we can do it, right guys?!

Um...guys?

Uh-oh.

Totally j/k by the way, everything's going swimmingly. We'll be ready for you guys August 17th or my name isn't Jonathan!

....wow.

07.03.11 3:11pm EDT

Scott,

Are you going to share those painkillers?

~Jonathan

The Mediocring

6.28.11 1:47am EDT

I'm so sorry.

I know that that we aren't supposed to go exploring out past the creek. There was a storm, the lightning was right overhead. And there was shelter underneath the big mosoleums. I climbed the high rusty fence and tried to ring out the rain from my clothes. There was the old wall, I guess it was limestone that was weathered from the rain. I leaned aginst it and fell right through the the wall. The air got colder, and a rotten smell left me choaking on the putrid air. Old bones began to stir.

I know we're better off with it dead. But as promised, Rupeethon is coming back and now it's slowly gaining strength. It's gathering better AV equipment. The dust is falling from the corpse of its website and new code begins to pump through the veins.

I saw glimpses of terrible things: an amazing one-of-a-kind prize forged from twisted science. Sirencalls for contest and prize suggestions. Dark riders scouring the cyberscape for an errant CDi. Better donation widgets and chat support. The black day is approaching, and I'm not sure if anyone can stop it anymore. Rupeethon still lives. I'm so sorry